Our site backupanytime.com has enjoyed very strong Google position for some considerable time with regard to online backup related search.
Last week we noticed that a blog post was taking some time to be indexed and this was obvious given to us given we had become acustomed to having posts ranked within 15 mins. This wasn't a major problem as indexing at that speed is not something we require. Since then the situation has got very bad indeed.
As of today we more or less do not exist in Google. Even sites which just mention us are ahead for many searches. We are still strong in other search engines but Google is (normally) our main source of traffic.
We have never bought a link. We have never been part of a link exchange program. All of our content is original. We have never had this difficulty before. We have not had any complaints. Our Google webmaster tools account shows nothing unusual. The only issues it highlights are some long or short meta descriptions which we commonly see in the webmaster tools and address ongoingly.
Any advice would be much appreciated.
Thanks
John

John,
1)Did you check the Google Webmaster console ? Check [1] & [2]
2)34 links in your footer could be considered a bit excessive.
3) looking at your code it seems a little messy, but shouldn't be too much of a problem could be interpreted as hidden links.

Your site could do with a SEO makeover
Edit : what did you get for your cash here? Do you know any thing that they might have tried that could have compromised you ?

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I wouldn't say that's the problem as all these links goes to different pages.

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True louie, but maybe he added them in one go, or has done other changes on his site.
John you should make sure you have the right WHOIS info .

Should I tackle these issues (webmaster console issues, reduce footer link quantity and tidy code) or wait awhile incase google recrawls?
Thanks
John

The who is has been that way since a host move a long time ago. Our attention was raised to it recently and I am assured it will be resolved by tomorrow.

Thanks
John

When did Google last crawl your site ?

The reason for your blog being slow could be due to the high number of tags you have.

You could be penalised for having multiple versions of the same content on your domain.

That wouldn't cause a penalty - Google would just filter out dupes. It could affect your internal pagerank flow however. But I seriously doubt that could affect your rankings so drastically.

FIrst thing I'd do is scan your site for any compromise - look for outbound links to bad neighbourhoods. Also use the google cache for this, as some compromises are very crafty and only show to Googlebot.

Next thing is check your backlinks - see if you've lost any powerful authoritative backlinks. I took a quick view, but mainly blog comments.

It could be algorithmic, or it might just be a SERP burp - wait a little time and see if rankings return.

One last thing - have you had any site outages?

Rgds
Richard

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